"This is an invitation to come together across the world for a memorial carnival in the spirit of the one and only, David Graeber, who just left us so suddenly and unexpectedly. The invitation emerges from his wife Nika and a handful of his friends. ...

"Being a player in the anti-capitalist movements of the 90's and noughties, he knew about the irresistible similarities between the experience of a carnival and an insurrection. Exactly 9 years ago today, on the 17th of September an invitation was responded to and a movement was born. The invitation simply said: 'Occupy Wall Street - Bring a tent'. David was one of the tens of thousands who responded by organising and occupying, the rest is history. Today we invite you to organise a memorial carnival for David wherever you are on Sunday October the 11th.

"Whether you are alone at home and want to just read your favorite passage of his work, or an activist collective that wants to take over the streets with a mass assembly; whether you are a group of academics in a seminar room or fighters on the front line; whether you are in a squat or on an anthropological field trip, a protest camp or a museum, anywhere can host a memorial carnival. There is a simple rule however: ‘bring a mask’ (more carnival than covid style of course).

"Plans are already underway for dozens of events including at Zuccotti Park NY, in Rojova, the zad, Korea, Austria, Berlin, London."

Find out more here.

After months of downplaying the threat of the virus that has killed over 200,000 Americans (and, tragically, counting), the president and first lady have both tested positive for COVID-19. According to the president himself, the pair will quarantine for an unspecified duration in the White House. With little over a month until election day, and less than two weeks until the next presidential debate, the future of the incumbent's campaign — and of the country — is thrown into new depths of uncertainty. Will he recover in time to belittle the virus' severity, further complicating the U.S.'s shambolic mismanagement of the pandemic? Will he once again promote disproven remedies, much like his once-infected Brazilian counterpart? Or will President Trump's ailing health elongate the shadow of anxiety that extends over a Union already wracked with natural disasters, bitter divide, unrest, and economic recession? In the darkness looms little light. The president's wellbeing, and the nation's, hangs in the balance.

In his book Rethinking China’s Rise: A Liberal Critique, Xu [Jilin] gives a wide-ranging analysis of China’s recent history. His main point is that China has headed down the dangerous path of historicism — the belief that universal values do not exist and that everything is determined by national history. ...

"Chinese today are like nineteenth-century Europeans, bursting with ambition, industrious and thrifty, full of greed and desire; they believe that the weak are meat for the strong and that only the apt survive — they are vastly different from traditional Chinese, who prized righteousness over profit and were content with moderation. What kind of victory is this?…"

What China hasn’t grasped, Xu writes, is the distinction between civilization and culture. The new world civilization, he argues, embraces common values for all of humanity. Culture, by contrast, is specific, but need not come into conflict with those common values — the concept of rights, for example, can be found in Chinese tradition. Xu holds that China’s behavior resembles that of nineteenth-century Germany, which believed that its Kultur was superior to Anglo-Saxon Zivilisation, a view that led German elites to justify their country’s slide toward militarism and fascism.

Of direct relevance to today’s events — one thinks immediately of Xinjiang’s reeducation camps for religious Uighurs — are Xu’s comments on ethnic (or Han) Chinese. They make up 92 percent of the population of the People’s Republic, and he argues that they have imposed their views on China’s other fifty-five ethnicities. This is because the Han-dominated state’s vision fails to offer universal values that would appeal to the country’s non-Chinese ethnicities.

— Ian Johnson, "The Flowers Blooming in the Dark," New York Review of Books